A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to quality of service guarantees and, more particularly, to systems and methods for providing connectivity service-level guarantees for network communication.
B. Description of Related Art
In the highly competitive Internet service provision industry, service-level guarantees (SLGs) have become an extremely important market differentiator. The trend in SLGs has included a movement toward service contracts that attach financial penalties to failures to meet certain key network performance criteria. Since the industry remains in a state of flux, service providers must constantly extend and revise their SLGs to compete. As a result, service providers must face the dilemma of formulating meaningful performance criteria to attract and retain business, while avoiding imposing a financially ruinous burden on the company.
An important aspect of SLGs is compliance monitoring. Currently, SLGs are reactive in the sense that customers must monitor performance and submit a claim when they experience poor service. At the same time, however, the service provider must monitor its own performance, both to make sure that sufficient resources are available to comply with its SLGs, and to verify and validate customer claims.
A typical SLG criteria includes the measurement of connectivity or reachability (i.e., a determination of the availability of a network resource). Conventional systems measure connectivity by pinging (i.e., sending an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ping packet to a resource and waiting for a reply) every resource, such as a router, from every resource. This produces an unmanageable burden, however, on network resources. In addition, sending the pings between all possible source-destination pairs, as well as collecting and analyzing the data, requires processing that is very difficult to administer.
As a result, a need exists for a system that facilitates monitoring of connectivity to validate customer SLG claims.